#targaryens

Now, he stood in your chamber, the door closed behind him, turning the pages of your book with the same hands that had wielded Dark Sister for decades. His expression was unreadable.

"This is dangerous knowledge," he said at last. "Where did you find it?"

"Here," you said. "In the library. In the vaults below. Dragonstone is old, father." You swallowed hard. "Tyanna was not the only one who knew these rites. The Valyrians practiced blood magic for thousands of years. They used it to bind their dragons, to shape the very stone of their towers. This is just…another application."

Daemon looked at you, and for a moment you saw something flicker in his gaze. Pride, perhaps, or recognition. You were his daughter, after all, no matter which marriage had produced you. You had his blood in your veins, his fire, his refusal to accept the world as it was when you could bend it to your will instead.

"You want to do this for the boy," he said.

"He is my betrothed," you said, and your voice cracked on the word despite your best efforts. "He has been my betrothed since I was old enough to understand what the word meant. I was meant to marry him, father. I was meant to stand beside him when he took the throne. I was meant to…" You stopped, pressing your lips together, forcing the tears back. You would not weep. Not yet. Not while there was still something you could do.

Daemon was silent for a long moment. Then he closed the book and set it aside.

"The maesters believe he will die," he said. "They will not say it to Rhaenyra's face, they value their heads too much for that, but they have stopped trying to remove the arrow from his neck. They say it is too close to the artery. They say he has lost too much blood. They say even if he wakes, the wound will fester and poison him from within." His jaw tightened. "He is dying, daughter. Slowly but surely. If you do nothing, he will be dead anyway."

"Then I have to try," you said.

"Yes," Daemon agreed, and there was something almost gentle in his voice, something you had not heard from him in a very long time. "You do. And I will help you."

"Rhaenyra..."

"Rhaenyra must not know." Daemon's voice hardened. "She is already half-mad with grief. If she knew what we were attempting, she would forbid it. Or she would hope too much, and the disappointment would destroy her if you failed. No. This stays between us. I will stand guard outside the door. I will make certain no one disturbs you. Whatever you need, candles, herbs, a blade, I shall provide it. The rest is up to you."

You nodded, your heart beating so fast you could feel it in your throat. "Tonight," you said. "It has to be tonight. The maesters say the hour just before dawn is the most dangerous. If he survives until morning, it will be a miracle. I need to act before then."

Daemon reached out and put his firm hand on your shoulder. "You are my daughter," he said. "You have my blood. Whatever you need to do, do it without hesitation. Do it without doubt. The magic will know if your will wavers."

"I won't waver," you said.

He looked at you for a long moment, and then he nodded. "I know you won't."

The hour was late when you made your way to the chamber where Jacaerys lay. The castle was quiet, the servants and guards moving through the corridors like ghosts, their footsteps muffled by the weight of impending tragedy. Everyone knew. Everyone was waiting. The heir to the heir, the bright young prince who had flown to the Gullet with fire in his heart, was slipping away, and there was nothing anyone could do.

Except you. You could do something. You would do something.

Daemon walked beside you, a silent shadow in black and red. When you reached the door to Jace's chamber, he stopped and turned to face you.

"I will be here," he said quietly. "No one will enter until you open this door from the inside. Take as long as you need."

You nodded, not trusting your voice, and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

The room was dim, lit only by a single candle on the bedside table and the faint glow of the hearth fire. The windows were shuttered against the night air, and the scent of medicinal herbs hung thick in the air: poultices and tinctures and the smell of boiling wine used to cleanse wounds. But underneath it all was the smell of blood, old and new, and the sickly-sweet undertone of a body fighting a losing battle against death.

Jacaerys lay on the bed, and the sight of him made your heart clench like a fist.

He was so still. Jacaerys, who had always been in motion, always talking, always planning, always reaching for the next thing, lay utterly motionless beneath the furs. His face was ashen, his cheeks sunken, dark circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes. His lips were cracked and dry, parted slightly, and his breathing was so shallow you had to watch his chest for a long moment to be sure it was still moving. The arrow had been removed from his shoulder and the one from his side had been cut out, the wounds stitched and bandaged. But the third arrow, the one in his neck, was still there. The maesters had cut the shaft short, leaving only a few inches protruding from the swollen, angry flesh, but they had not dared to remove the head. It was lodged against something vital, and any attempt to pull it free would tear the vessel and kill him in moments.

You stood beside the bed for a long time, just looking at him. Remembering.

You remembered the first time you had met him, when you were both children, before you understood what betrothal meant. He had been solemn and serious even then, trying so hard to be worthy of the inheritance that had fallen to him. You had thought him stuffy at first, too concerned with duty and honor to be any fun. But then he had smiled at you, a quick, surprised smile, and you had seen the boy beneath the prince, and something had shifted in your heart.

You remembered the day your dragon died. The Battle of Rook's Rest. The sky had been full of fire and screaming, and you had been on your dragon's back, trying to stay alive, trying to fight, trying to do something, anything, to help. And then Rhaenys had fallen. Meleys had plunged from the sky in a tangle of scarlet wings, and Vhagar had turned. The ancient she-dragon had fixed her terrible eyes on you, and Aemond's voice had echoed across the battlefield, shouting something you could not hear over the roar of wind and flame. He had wanted to take you, you learned later. A prize. A hostage. A trophy to hang on his wall. But your dragon had fled, faster than Vhagar could follow, and had carried you all the way back to Dragonstone before succumbing to her wounds. She had died on the beach, her great head resting on sand, her eyes fixed on you with an apology you could not bear to receive. You had held her until the light went out of her, and then you had stood and walked up to the castle and begun to plan how you would make the Greens pay.

Jace had held you that night. He had not said anything, there was nothing to say, but he had held you, and let you weep into his shoulder, and when you were finished he had kissed your forehead and told you that you were the bravest person he had ever met.

Now he was dying, and you were going to save him, no matter what it cost.

You set down the small bag you had brought with you and began to prepare. From the bag you drew a candle of black wax, a small silver knife, a bowl of beaten copper, and a roll of parchment covered in the symbols and words you had copied from the old texts. You arranged them on the floor beside the bed, your hands steady despite the trembling in your heart. Then you drew back the furs and looked at Jace's wounds.

The bandages on his shoulder and side were fresh, changed that evening by the maesters. But the wound in his neck was the one that mattered. You leaned close, examining it in the dim light. The flesh around the arrow shaft was red and swollen, hot to the touch even from inches away. The skin had begun to take on a greyish tinge at the edges, and when you inhaled carefully, you caught the faint, foul scent of corruption beginning to take hold. The maesters were right. If the arrow was not removed, the infection would spread. It would poison his blood, and he would die in fever and delirium. But if they tried to remove it, the arrowhead would tear the great vessel in his neck, and he would drown in his own blood in moments.

Unless you changed the rules.

You had studied the accounts of the Valyrian blood mages for years. You had devoured every scrap of knowledge you could find about the old sorceries, the fire magic that had raised the Freehold to its terrible glory. And you had learned that blood was the key. Blood was always the key. Blood was life, and life was power, and power, properly channeled, could reshape the world.

The ritual Tyanna of Pentos had used, or something very like it, was described in fragments throughout the texts you had found. It was not healing in the traditional sense. It was something older, darker and more profound. It was the transference of life force, the binding of spirit to flesh, the rekindling of the inner fire that kept the soul tethered to the body. The subject would not simply recover. They would be remade, their body repaired not by natural processes but by the direct application of magical will. And the cost would be paid in blood. Not Jace's blood. Yours.

You knelt beside the bed and lit the black candle. The flame burned with a strange, bluish light, and the air in the room seemed to thicken, growing heavy and still. You picked up the silver knife and positioned the copper bowl on the floor before you.

"I don't know if you can hear me," you said quietly, looking at Jace's still face. "But if you can…hold on. Just a little longer. I'm going to bring you back."

Then you set the blade against the inside of your left forearm and cut.

The pain was immediate. Blood welled up from the wound, you held your arm over the copper bowl, letting it drip down into the metal basin. The candle flame flickered, then steadied, burning brighter than before. You closed your eyes and began to speak.

The words were High Valyrian. They were harsh, full of consonants that scraped against your throat and vowels that burned on your tongue. You had practiced them for hours, mouthing them silently in your chamber, but speaking them aloud was different. They had weight. They had presence. Each syllable seemed to hang in the air, resonating with something deep beneath the world.

We ask the Lord to shine his light, and the debt of blood to be paid.

With fire and blood, the debt shall be paid.

Your blood continued to flow, more than you had expected, more than seemed safe. The copper bowl was filling, the dark liquid swirling in the candlelight, and you felt a strange pulling sensation in your chest, as if something vital was being drawn out of you along with the blood. The candle flame rose higher, no longer blue but a deep, angry red, and the shadows in the room began to move.

You reached out with your bleeding arm and pressed your hand against the wound in Jace's neck, your fingers circling the broken arrow shaft. The moment your blood touched his skin, you felt it: a connection, a bridge, a channel opening between your life and his. You could feel his weak heartbeat, fluttering against your palm like a trapped bird. You could feel the poison spreading through his veins, the infection that was eating away at his flesh. And you could feel the arrowhead, a cold sliver of metal lodged against the pulsing wall of his artery, a hairsbreadth from the arms of the Stranger.

No, you thought, and poured yourself into him.

It was like falling. Like drowning. Like being unmade and remade in the space of a single heartbeat. Your vision went white, then red, then black, and you were somewhere else, somewhere vast and dark and full of fire. You could feel Jace there, a flickering ember in the darkness, barely holding on. And you could feel something else, something vast and hungry, watching you from the shadows. The magic. The old power. It wanted what you were offering. It wanted the blood, the life, the sacrifice. It wanted you.

Take it, you said, or thought, or screamed into the void. Take whatever you need. Just give him back to me.

The darkness surged forward, and you knew nothing more.

You woke in your own bed, with sunlight streaming through the windows and the sound of shouting echoing through the corridors.

For a long, disorienting moment, you had no idea where you were or how you had gotten there. Your body felt strange, heavy and hollow at the same time, as if someone had scooped out your insides and replaced them with lead. Your left arm throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, and when you lifted it to look, you saw that someone had bandaged it. The white linen was spotted with red, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

The shouting grew louder. Footsteps pounded past your door. Someone was calling for the maester, and someone else was weeping, and beneath it all was a rising tide of voices, excited and frightened and disbelieving.

And then you remembered.

You sat up so fast the room spun around you. You grabbed the bedpost, steadying yourself, and swung your legs over the side of the bed. Your head pounded, your vision blurring, but you forced yourself to stand, to walk, to open the door and step out into the corridor.

A serving girl was running past, her eyes wide and her face flushed. You caught her arm.

"What's happening?" you demanded, and your voice came out rough and strange, barely recognizable as your own.

"My lady!" The girl's words tumbled over each other in her haste. "It's the prince! Prince Jacaerys! He's awake! He's awake, and the maester says his wounds are healing, and the Queen is with him now..."

You let go of her arm. She kept talking, but you were already moving, pushing past her, walking as fast as your unsteady legs would carry you toward Jace's chamber.

The corridor outside his room was crowded with people, servants and guards and minor lords, all craning their necks and whispering among themselves. They parted when they saw you, their eyes wide with surprise or curiosity or something else you didn't have the presence of mind to identify. You didn't care. You didn't care about any of it. You only cared about the door at the end of the corridor and what lay beyond it.

Daemon was leaning by the door. He saw you coming, and his expression flickered, relief and what might have been pride or might have been concern. He stepped forward to meet you.

"It worked," his voice was pitched low so only you could hear. "The maester examined him this morning. The swelling in his neck has gone down. The corruption is receding. They were able to remove the arrowhead safely an hour ago. He is weak, but he is alive, and he is awake."

You closed your eyes for a moment, swaying on your feet. The relief that flooded through you was so intense it was almost painful. "I need to see him."

"Rhaenyra is with him now. She has been there since they told her. She is…" Daemon paused, searching for the right word. "Overjoyed. She thinks it's a miracle."

"It is a miracle," you said.

Daemon's eyes met yours. "Yes," he agreed. "It is. But not the kind she thinks." He put his hand on your shoulder, steadying you. "You did well, daughter. Better than I dared to hope. But be careful with him, he hasn't quite come back to himself yet."

He opened the door, and you stepped inside.

The first thing you saw was Rhaenyra. The Queen was sitting on the edge of the bed, her silver-gold hair unbound and disheveled, her face wet with tears. She was holding Jace's hand in both of hers, and she was speaking to him in a low, urgent voice, her words tumbling out too fast to follow. She looked exhausted, wrung out, the way a person looks when they have been holding themselves together for so long that the relief of letting go is almost as painful as the fear.

And then you saw Jace.

He was sitting up against the pillows, his dark hair brushed back from his face, his eyes open and alert. The bandage on his neck was fresh and white, and his color was better than it had been in days, still pale, but no longer grey, no longer the ashen hue of a corpse waiting to happen. He was thinner than before, the bones of his face more prominent, but he was alive. He was alive.

He looked up when you entered, your eyes met, and you felt as though your heart would burst.

"Jace," you breathed.

His expression shifted. For a moment, he looked almost confused, as if he didn't quite recognize you. Then his face cleared, and he smiled, a small, tired smile, but a real one, and held out his free hand to you.

"There you are," he said. His voice was hoarse, rough from disuse, but it was his voice. "I was wondering when you would come."

You crossed the room without thinking, barely aware of Rhaenyra moving aside to make space for you. You took his hand, his fingers closed around yours, and he was warm. He was warm. You had been so afraid that he would be cold, that the ritual would have taken something essential from him, that he would be a shell wearing Jace's face. But his hand was warm, and his pulse beat steady in his wrist.

Except.

Except there was something different in his eyes. A gleam. A light that hadn't been there before. When he looked at you, you felt the weight of his attention, focused and intense. There was none of the softness you remembered, none of the gentle uncertainty that had always lurked beneath his princely composure. This was a Jacaerys who had looked into the darkness and come back with something of it still burning behind his eyes.

"Your Grace," you said to Rhaenyra, remembering your courtesies even as your heart hammered against your ribs. "I came as soon as I heard."

"He's going to be all right," Rhaenyra said, and her voice broke on the words. "The maester says he's going to be all right. I don't understand it. None of them understand it. But I don't care. My son is alive." She pressed a hand to her mouth, tears spilling down her cheeks again. "I'm so relieved. I thought I'd lost you. I thought I'd lost both of you."

She meant Luke, you realized. Lucerys, who had died at Storm's End, whose death had started the cascade of violence that had led here. Rhaenyra had lost one son already. She could not bear to lose another.

Jace's expression softened. "I'm here," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. But if I could speak with my betrothed now. Alone, if you don't mind."

Rhaenyra hesitated, looking between the two of you. Then she nodded, pressing a kiss to Jace's forehead before rising from the bed. "I'll be just outside," she said. "I'll send for some broth. You need to eat. You need to regain your strength."

She left the room, and the door closed behind her with a soft click. You and Jace were alone.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. You were still holding his hand, and he was still looking at you with that strange, intense gaze, and you didn't know what to say. What did you say to someone you had pulled back from the edge of death? What did you say to someone who might owe their life to a ritual you barely understood and a power you had no right to wield?

"You did something," Jace said at last.

You opened your mouth to deny it, but the words wouldn't come. His eyes were too sharp, too knowing. He could see right through you.

"Yes," you said quietly. "I did."

"What did you do?"

You told him everything. You were too tired to lie and too frightened to hold it in, and because he deserved to know what had been done to him.

When you finished, he was silent for a long moment. Then he reached up with his free hand and touched the bandage on his neck, his fingers tracing the edge of it with a strange, detached curiosity.

"I died," he said. "Didn't I?"

"No," you denied quickly. "No, you were still alive. The maesters said..."

"The maesters said I was going to die. They said there was nothing they could do." His eyes met yours again. "I remember the water. The cold. I remember Vermax screaming. And then…nothing. Darkness. Just darkness, for a long time. And then something else. Something pulling me back. It felt like fire. Like dragonfire, but inside me. In my blood. In my bones." He paused. "Was that you?"

You swallowed hard. "I don't know. I don't know what I did. The texts said the ritual could transfer life force, could bind spirit to flesh, could rekindle the inner fire. But they didn't say how. They didn't say what the cost would be. I just…I couldn't let you die. I couldn't. Not when there was something I could try."

Jace looked at you for a long moment. Then he pulled you toward him, and before you knew what was happening, his arms were around you and your face was pressed against his shoulder and he was holding you so tightly you could barely breathe.

"You foolish, brave, tricky woman," he murmured into your hair. "You could have died. You could have killed yourself. For me."

"There was no choice," you said, your voice muffled against his chest. "There was never a choice. Don't you understand? Without you, there's no point. There's no point to any of it."

You felt him exhale a shaky breath. His hand came up to stroke your hair, gentle despite the new strength you could feel in his grip. "I understand," he said. "I understand better than you know."

You pulled back slightly, looking up at him. Your eyes were wet, you realized. You had been crying without noticing it. He reached up and wiped the tears from your cheeks with his thumb, his touch warm and achingly familiar.

"When I was pulled from the darkness," he whispered, "I dreamed. I dreamed of fire and blood and a throne made of swords. I dreamed of our enemies burning. I dreamed of Aemond Targaryen dying in the mud, with my hands around his throat. I dreamed of victory, absolute and total, with no mercy and no quarter and no hesitation. I dreamed of everything I was too weak to do before." His voice hardened, and that gleam in his eyes grew brighter, more dangerous. "I'm not weak anymore."

You stared at him. There was something new and terrible and fierce in his voice. The boy you had known was still there, but there was something else now, something that had been forged in the darkness and brought back with him into the light.

"The Greens took my brother," Jace said. "They took my dragon. They took my birthright. They tried to take my life. They tried to take you." His hands tightened on your arms. "They will fail. They will all fail. I am going to recover from this. I am going to get out of this bed, and I am going to be there when my mother takes King's Landing. And then I am going to find Aemond Targaryen, and I am going to make him pay for every drop of blood he has spilled."

"Jace," you said, and you didn't know if it was a warning or a plea or a prayer.

"When I woke up," he continued, as if you hadn't spoken, "I felt different. I feel…more. More alive, more aware. Better, altogether." He laughed without humour. "I feel like someone lit a fire inside me and it's never going to go out. Is that what you did to me? Is that what the magic made me?"

"I don't know," you whispered. "I didn't know what it would do. The texts said…"

"The texts said Maegor came back changed. Crueler. Stronger. Unstoppable." Jace's eyes met yours. "Maybe that's what I am now. Maybe that's what you made me."

"No. You're not Maegor. You're not cruel. You're not..."

"I'm not what I was before." He said it calmly, as if stating a simple fact. "I can feel it. The part of me that hesitated, that second-guessed, that worried about being good enough, worthy enough, it's gone. Burned away. All that's left is the fire." He cupped your face in his hands, his palms were warm against your cheeks. "But I'm still me. I'm still yours. That hasn't changed. That will never change."

He kissed you. It was not like the gentle, tentative kisses you had shared before. It was fierce, demanding, full of that new fire, and you found yourself responding to it despite your fear, despite your uncertainty. His lips were warm, his hands were strong, and he was alive. He was alive, and that was all that mattered.

When he pulled back, his eyes were still burning with that strange, fierce light. "You brought me back," he said. "You gave me a second chance. I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to win this war. I'm going to put my mother on the Iron Throne. I'm going to marry you, and we are going to build a dynasty that will last a thousand years." He smiled, and it was a crazed and beautiful thing. "I swear to you."

You looked at him. Your betrothed, your prince, the boy you had loved since before you understood what love was, and saw the man he had become. The fire in his eyes. The steel in his voice. The fury and the purpose and the unshakeable certainty. The old texts had warned that those brought back by blood magic were never quite the same. They came back changed. They came back wrong. But looking at him now, you couldn't bring yourself to believe it.

He wasn't wrong. He was more.

"Rest now," you said, pressing him back against the pillows. "Regain your strength. The war will still be there when you're healed."

He caught your wrist, his strong grip still surprised you. "Stay," he said. "Stay with me."

"I'm not going anywhere," you promised.

You stayed by his side as the days passed, watching as his strength returned with unnatural speed. The maesters marveled at his recovery, calling it a miracle, a blessing from the Seven, the indomitable will of the dragon blood. They didn't know. They couldn't know. Only you and Daemon knew the truth, and you kept it locked away in your hearts, a secret that bound you together in shared complicity.

Part 2: see here

a/n: Comment if you'd like to be added to this series' taglist.

Rn I'm tagging those who commented that they'd like me to post this fic: @ilovefoolishknights @mellowpeacequeen @disturbedturtle @pinkypurplez @oh-miniso @brlghtflame

The dressing room had been overtaken entirely. Your ladies-in-waiting moved around you, fanning bolts of fabric out on either side. Silks and velvets and things more delicate, colors ranging from a winter sea to a red so dark it bordered on black in certain lights. They rippled and shimmered as the women moved, catching the last warm gold of the evening sun that poured through the high chamber windows and turned everything briefly ethereal.

You yourself wore only a fitting garment, loose, unfinished, existing solely to give the seamstress her markers and to give you some vague impression of how the silhouette might look.

You had not expected the fabrics that were shown to you.

From silk to georgette, from heavy damask to something so fine and light it seemed to move of its own accord in the faintest touch. Every available cloth had been sourced, folded, hung, and presented for your consideration. The arrangement alone must have cost more than most lords spent on their entire household in a year.

You grimaced.

Both your husbands had an unseemly talent for excess when it came to you, a talent you had attempted to discourage. You had told them once, that it was entirely unnecessary, that you wanted for nothing, that they would do far better directing their generosity toward the smallfolk or the sept or truly anything that was not you.

You remembered very clearly how that conversation had gone.

Baelor had looked at you with that expression of his, that gave nothing away, a small smile settled at the corner of his mouth, his chin lifted. He had let you finish.

Then he had said: "For you, there is nothing too grand. You are Princess to this realm and Queen to be. You will be adorned as such."

You had looked to Maekar, hoping for an ally.

Maekar had looked back at you, then slowly crossed his arms across his chest, and considered the matter entirely settled, gave a single nod in agreement with everything Baelor had just said.

Not one word of his own.

The fabrics had arrived the following morning. More than before, if anything, as though the conversation had somehow encouraged them.

"Turn it," you said, and the ladies rotated a deep crimson satin. It caught the light differently on the second look, richer, almost mineral, like garnet pulled fresh from the earth. You tilted your head.

That one. Bold enough to honor them both. Red enough to make a statement without having to open your mouth.

You gave a single nod and a seamstress moved around you with tape and pins in hand. Hem, shoulders, the length of your arm.

Then she reached your middle.

She paused.

Her brow furrowed and she measured again. Carefully.

"Is something the matter?"

She startled, nearly dropping a few pins from her hand. "N-No, Your Grace. I apologize." Her eyes dropped immediately to her work but not before they had flickered, just once, to the soft curve of your belly.

You watched her in the mirror.

"I am asking you to be honest with me."

The seamstress swallowed.

"Yes, Your Grace. I will need to make some readjustments around your middle. I deeply apologize."

The room did not freeze so much as empty. The murmuring of your ladies trailing off into nothing, the rustle of fabric going still. Something small and quiet inside your chest simply stopped.

Your hands moved before you thought to stop them, settling over the curve of your belly. The way you might cover something you did not want seen.

It was such a small thing. Such an ordinary, professional observation from a woman simply doing her work. She had not been cruel. She had not even been unkind. And yet the words had found something in you that more than twenty years of marriage had left entirely unguarded because your husbands had never given you reason to guard it.

Not once.

Not in the dark, when there was nothing between you and their hands, when Baelor's mouth traced your skin and Maekar's grip left marks he never apologized for.

Not in passing, in the ordinary daylight hours of a shared life. Not in any of the thousand small moments that might have invited cruelty, had they been different men.

In more than twenty years, through six children and all the ways your body had changed and shifted and marked itself with the evidence of that, not once had either of them made you feel that any part of you required an apology, so you had simply never thought about it.

And yet, as if the gods had decided that women had not suffered quite enough, that small passing professional assessment had woken something in you that had apparently been sleeping very lightly. It was a foolish thought. You had never had reason to doubt yourself. Until someone else voiced it.

"Very well," you said.

Afterwards, when the seamstress had retreated to a smaller room next door to make her adjustments, you let your ladies press jewels into your palm for approximately thirty seconds before you raised your hand.

"Leave me."

They inclined their heads and left without a word. The door clicked shut behind them.

You stood before the mirror alone.

Slowly, you reached for the knot of the garment and let it fall.

It had been some time since you had truly looked at yourself.

Your breasts were softer than they had once been, heavier, sitting lower than you remembered. Your nipples darker than they had been in your girlhood. Your belly was soft too and mapped, hip to navel, with the pale silver traces of scars that had long since faded. But those were not the only marks.

There, low on your abdomen still faint after all these years, the long curved scar from Valarr. Your first birth, the hardest of them all. Three days of labor and a maester who had fought to keep you both in the world and won, barely.

Higher, at your left hip, the tear from Aerion. Too fast, too early, the kind of birth that happened before anyone was ready.

And then there, low, just above your pubic mound, Aegon's mark. The stubbornest of all of them, and the most intimate in its placement, a thin line that had refused to silver eight years. Still faintly pink.

Eight years since Aegon. Eight years since the last of them had come into the world red-faced and angry and perfect.

Six children. Six times your body had opened itself and endured and kept going and you had never, not once, allowed yourself to think of it as anything other than duty. What mothers did. What wives did. What was simply expected and therefore required no acknowledgment.

Standing here now, alone in the quiet of your chamber, you were not sure whether to feel proud of it or grieve it.

Perhaps both. Perhaps that was the only honest answer.

You thought of yourself twenty years ago. The smoothness of that skin. The absence of scars. The body that had not yet learned what it would be asked to do, or what it would cost.

You wondered, sometimes, if that girl would even recognize you.

Your eyes moved over your reflection again, searching for something.

And then, the questions came.

Did your husbands truly see this and feel what they claimed to feel?

Was it genuine?

Or was this simply duty to them?

The thought arrived like poison. Maybe they could do it because of someone else. A younger woman living in their minds. Softer skin behind closed eyes when their hands were on yours. Maybe that was how they managed it. Maybe that was the only way they could.

Your mind fed you the thought and then fed you more and you stood there and let it.

Your proudness. Your stubbornness. Twenty years of certainty, all of it quietly dismantled by nothing more than your own reflection.

You pressed your lips together.

You could not make it make sense. The body in the mirror and the hunger in their eyes could not possibly be looking at the same thing.

The shame followed.

It washed over you in a wave you were not prepared for. The doubt, the grief for that girl in the mirror who no longer existed, the deep humiliation of standing in your own skin and finding it wanting.

You had faced childbed fever. You had faced loss. You had sat at the bedsides of sick children and held yourself together by sheer will alone.

You had not expected this to be the thing that broke through.

You bent and retrieved the garment from the floor. Pulled it around your shoulders. Hugged it close with both arms wrapped tight across your middle and held yourself.

And then, quietly, you wept.

The doors to the great hall were open, with warm light and noise spilling into the corridor. You paused there for a moment, just long enough to straighten your shoulders, lift your chin, and make yourself look composed.

Your corset was tightly laced beneath your gown, shaping your figure into something polished and proper. It didn’t quite match what you had seen in the mirror an hour ago. Still, you were grateful for it, even if that feeling didn’t sit entirely right with everything else on your mind tonight.

Then the herald's voice rang out, cutting through the noise of the hall.

"Her Royal Highness, Princess of the Seven Kingdoms. Wife to Prince Baelor and Prince Maekar of House Targaryen. Mother to six princes of the realm."

The hall shifted. People turned to look. Voices grew quieter, one table at a time, starting near the doors and spreading across the hall.

You walked in.

The great hall had been transformed. Every long table draped in cloth of gold and deep Targaryen crimson, candles burning in their hundreds along the walls and suspended in iron chandeliers above, casting everything in warm amber light that caught the jewels of the assembled lords and ladies. Fresh flowers had been brought in from the glass gardens, white and red arranged in various displays between the candelabras, and the smell of them mingled with roasting meat and spiced wine made it clear this was a celebration.

The red gown was beautiful. You knew it was beautiful and yet all you felt was the weight of being looked at. Lords inclining their heads as your eyes passed over them. Ladies assessing you, smiles that may or may not have reached their eyes. You smiled back at all of them and felt beneath the corset uncomfortable in your own skin.

You breathed in.

And then, a loud shout.

"Mother!"

Aegon had spotted you from across the room, the conversation with Aemon abandoned mid-sentence.

He was already moving, pushing through the crowd with little care for manners. Two lords had to step quickly aside, and a lady grabbed her wine cup before he knocked into her.

He hit you around the middle.

Both arms thrown around you, his face pressing directly into the soft of your belly, his small hands gripping your sides with a force that was frankly surprising for someone his size. He held on with the complete certainty of a boy who had never once questioned whether he was wanted.

You stiffened and felt the grimace cross your face before you had any hope of stopping it. You were grateful that he was buried too far into you to see it.

"My sweetling." You kept your voice warm and drew him back gently, turning him by the shoulders to face you. "Look at you."

He wore an apricot silk doublet that shimmered through various shades of gold as he moved, with deep red and black visible beneath. Dornish in its cut, but threaded with elements of House Targaryen and there, if you looked closely, traces of your own house woven in.

Over his right breast hung a three-headed dragon in silver. Queen Myriah's doing, without question.

His hair had been dressed back from his face.

It would last another hour at most and you both knew it.

"How are you enjoying the festivities?" you asked, smoothing his collar with both hands.

Aegon's expression changed drastically. "Not much. The lords keep trying to talk to me about things I do not care about and Lord Bracken's son stepped on my foot and did not even apologize."

"Did he."

"Deliberately, I think."

"I am certain it was an accident."

"Aemon says I should not hit him back because we are at grandsire's feast and it would be embarrassing." He paused. "Aemon is probably right."

"Aemon is absolutely right."

"I know." He sighed, loudly. "I would still rather be outside."

"If it would make you feel better," you said, leaning slightly toward him and keeping your voice low, "I would rather be outside too."

His face split into a grin and you smiled back at him before you could help yourself. Your sweet boy.

A beat of comfortable silence settled between you, warm and easy and then...

He went still.

The grin faded, replaced by something that had no business being on the face of a boy his age. He looked up at you and the sheer focus of it caught you off guard, those violet eyes of his moving over your face with careful attention that made the back of your neck prickle.

You had the sudden and very uncomfortable feeling of being read.

"Are you alright?"

You held his gaze for a moment.

He looked back at you and waited, with a patience that was entirely Baelor's and a stubbornness that was entirely Maekar's, and the combination of the two on that small face was almost enough to undo you completely.

Gods. You had really gone and birthed sons with the observational instincts of their fathers.

"I am perfectly well, thank you my sweet." The words came out smooth and easy, "Now go back to your brother."

Aegon's face arranged itself into a scowl. He held it for a moment, clearly weighing his options, and then turned and scurried back toward Aemon.

He looked back at you once.

Over his shoulder, those too-sharp eyes finding your face across the hall with an ease that should not have been possible at his age.

You turned your attention to the room instead and searched the rest of the hall for your sons.

Aerion was not difficult to find. He stood at the center of a small cluster of young noble ladies, all of them flushed and giggling, their eyes moving over him freely and without shame.

He was enjoying every moment of it, you could tell by the set of his shoulders, the easy smile, the way he leaned slightly toward whoever was speaking. He wore House Targaryen colors, bold black with red accents, but underneath, if you looked closely, faint lines of apricot silk caught the light.

Matarys stood not far from his brother, which was where Matarys tended to be, close enough to keep an eye on things, far enough to want no part in them. He was talking to a group of men, several of them knights by the look of them, all wearing very serious expressions. Matarys fit right in amongst them. The difference between him and Aerion not twenty feet away was so completely typical of them both that you felt a laugh leave you.

Your eyes moved on.

To the right, beside the Iron Throne, King Daeron stood with Queen Myriah, talking to a group from Tyrosh. Beside them stood Kiera and Valarr nearby, doing a poor job of pretending he had not noticed her. You watched him steal a glance at her. Watched her notice. Watched them both look away in opposite directions like two people with absolutely nothing to hide.

You pressed your lips together.

It was indeed a very good match.

Further along the hall your second eldest Daeron stood with a young lord from House Lannister.

It was a fine atmosphere. Warm and loud and glittering with everything a celebration ought to be.

And yet your eyes, traitorously, had begun to move.

The hall was full of lords, naturally. Men of every age and station filling the long tables, deep in the serious business of being seen and seeing others. But between them, beside them, were their daughters. Their sisters. Young noble ladies in gowns of every color, their skin smooth, their laughter easy, their figures untouched by the demands of duty and childbirth and years.

They moved through the hall like light through glass, effortless, bright, drawing the eye without trying.

You watched them and felt something ugly stir in the pit of your stomach.

It was shameless, the thought that followed. You knew it was shameless even as it took shape. But there it was regardless, rising up from that same dark place where the doubt had been living all evening.

Your husbands were men. Vital, powerful, striking men who commanded every room they entered. And these girls were everywhere tonight, glowing with youth that required no effort other than a beautiful gown.

What man, given the choice, would stop himself. After all even your husbands...

You stopped the thought before it finished itself.

And yet the shame sat in you like a stone at the bottom of a river and your feet did not want to carry you further into the room.

You were still standing there, caught between duty and the desire to simply not, when a hand settled at your side.

Warm. Familiar. Fingers curling against your hip like they had every right to be there . A private hello in the middle of a very public room. It pressed, just slightly, into the softness there.

You pulled away before you had consciously decided to and turned.

Baelor.

He stood close and his head dipped slightly toward your ear, his voice dropping to something low and meant only for you.

"My love. You look radiant tonight."

That voice. Even now, after everything, after all the years, the low warm of it settled deep in your belly, coiling somewhere intimate and inconvenient, and you had no control over it whatsoever.

It died as quickly as it came.

You stepped back, just slightly.

"Husband." You kept your voice light and easy. "How are you enjoying the festivities?"

There it was, that flutter in his eyes. Brief, barely there. His gaze moved over you, top to bottom and back again, slow and thorough.

You watched him pull himself together and so you looked at him properly for the first time this evening.

He was, by any honest accounting, unfairly handsome for a man his age.

His brown hair had grown into something richer with the years, peppered through with grey that caught the candlelight like silver thread, slightly longer on top and curling at the ends.

His mismatched eyes were warm tonight, full of that quiet command that he carried as naturally as other men carried swords. His beard was trimmed close and neat, framing the line of his jaw.

He was broad through the shoulder, straight-backed, carrying himself with the kind of authority that could not be taught and could not be faked.

He wore a long doublet of black so deep it drank the light, and yet the fabric itself gave off something, a deep red hue that surfaced depending on how he moved, like embers beneath coal. It fit him extraordinarily well.

He caught you staring and smiled.

It was, unfortunately, an extremely handsome smile.

And then your eyes moved past him, just for a moment and your stomach dropped.

They were looking at him.

Several of the young noble ladies you had noted earlier had their eyes fixed on your husband with an attention that could not be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it was, hungry and shameless.

The look of women who saw something they wanted and had not yet decided against reaching for it. One, in a pale gold gown, had her lips slightly parted, her gaze dragging over Baelor with a boldness that made your jaw tighten. Another leaned toward her companion and murmured something in her ear, her eyes never leaving his profile. A third young, dark haired beautiful woman was not even attempting subtlety. She was simply staring, her wine cup forgotten in her hand. She was fucking him with her eyes and she did not care who knew it.

And when they finally noticed you looking, they did not even have the decency to look ashamed. Just a small glance aside. A little smile shared between them. And then, one of them reached up and pulled her neckline just low enough to make herself perfectly clear.

The jealousy that hit you was hot and ugly and you did not care even slightly that it was, because you were fairly certain that if you opened your mouth right now not a single dignified thing would come out of it.

You turned back to your husband.

He was still looking only at you.

Which somehow made it worse.

"I am enjoying myself greatly." His voice dropped just low enough that it was only for you. "Though at present it is you I am most enjoying looking at."

You scoffed. It came out before you could dress it in something more appropriate, sharp and dismissive and you watched his smile falter at the edges.

And then something rose up in you that you had no name for and no warning of, a hot, wordless anger that had nothing reasonable at its root. You were angry at the way he looked at you. Angry at the sincerity of it. Angry, most of all, because you wanted to believe it and could not, and that felt like his fault even though it wasn't, and you knew it wasn't, and that made you angrier still.

"Must you always stand so close to me."

It came out sharper than you intended and you did not apologize for it.

Baelor stilled.

"My love—"

"I simply need room to breathe." You kept your chin up. Kept your voice even. "That is all."

He looked at you for a moment with those mismatched eyes of his, steady and careful, just observing.

It was, you thought, extremely irritating.

"Of course." He said it quietly, graciously and inclined his head at you. Not a single trace of reproach in it.

That somehow made it worse.

You turned and walked away from him, your chin high and your chest tight, and did not look back.

You moved through the hall with your head high, nodding once to Lord Tully as you passed, exchanging a small smile with one of the Tyrell women.

You lifted a goblet of wine from a passing servant's tray without breaking stride and by the time you reached the grand table and settled into your seat, you felt utterly terrible for the way you snapped at Baelor. Yet the small irrational part of you that had wanted a reaction, that had wanted to crack that composure of his just slightly, sat in your chest alongside the guilt and did not apologize for itself.

A servant appeared at your elbow almost immediately, setting down a small board arranged with care. Aged cheese, dark bread, sliced cold meat fanned out.

And in the center, nestled amongst it all—

A sugar-filled date.

You stared at it.

It was your favorite. Had been your favorite for as long as you could remember, and someone in this kitchen had thought of that tonight and the small thoughtfulness of it should have moved you and instead it did the opposite entirely. Your eyes dropped to your belly, hidden and shaped and smoothed beneath the crimson gown, and something unreasonable moved through you.

You picked the date up and set it on the plate beside you without eating it.

You looked at the rest of the food, decided against all of it, and lifted your eyes to the hall instead.

Across the room, Matarys, Aerion and Daeron had found each other in the far corner, three goblets of wine between them, heads bent together over something that had all three of them laughing, their cheeks flushed rosy with warmth and wine and each other's company. You watched them for a moment longer than you meant to. Your boys. Grown and broad-shouldered and loud with laughter and so thoroughly themselves that something in your chest pulled tight and sweet at the sight of them.

Aemon and Aegon had migrated toward a group of children from the Dornish houses, deep in what appeared to be a very serious game of hands.

You smiled to yourself.

Further down the hall you caught sight of Valarr and Kiera, half hidden from the rest of the room near the far wall. Valarr was speaking low, his whole attention on her face, and Kiera's cheeks were pink and she was leaning closer without seeming to realize she was doing it.

You looked away. That was theirs. It did not need an audience.

You were still watching the hall with your wine when a figure approached and stopped at the edge of your table. Young. Well dressed. A face you placed after a moment of thought, Lord Arryn's son. Ronnel.

He inclined his head to you.

"May I, Your Grace?" He gestured to the empty seat beside you.

You nodded.

He sat, settled himself, and turned to you with the expression of someone who had been working up to this approach for some time.

"It is a fine night tonight, Your Grace."

"It is indeed. How are you enjoying yourself, Lord Arryn?"

He smiled and opened his mouth to answer.

And then his eyes dropped to the small plate beside you, to the date sitting there untouched, and without a word he reached over and picked it up. Turned it between his fingers.

You watched his hand.

Something about it struck you as both very young and very male, and you said nothing, only watched and waited to see what he would do with it.

He set the date down and turned to you properly.

"I am enjoying myself greatly, Your Grace. Though I confess the company at my table pales considerably compared to the company I find here."

"You are kind, Lord Arryn."

"I am honest." He said it with a grin, his eyes moved over you in a way that was not subtle.

"My father speaks very highly of your family. Of you especially."

"Does he."

"He says there is no woman in the Seven Kingdoms who has given more to the realm than you have." He leaned forward slightly, his elbow finding the table, closing the distance between you. "Six sons, Your Grace. Six princes. The realm owes you a great debt."

And there it was.

Said with complete sincerity. Said as a compliment, wrapped in genuine admiration, delivered with that uncomplicated smile.

Six sons. As though that was the whole of you. As though the most remarkable thing about you was the number of times your body had successfully produced an heir.

You kept your smile exactly where it was.

"The realm is very generous in its accounting," you said pleasantly.

He laughed and his eyes dropped briefly, just briefly, to the neckline of your gown before finding your face again.

"If I may say, Your Grace." His voice dropped just slightly. "The realm rather undersells you."

"Is that so."

"Considerably." He held your gaze and did not look away, his grin shifting into something a little slower, a little more sure of itself.

"I find myself wondering how it is that two princes have managed to keep you entirely to themselves all these years without the rest of us losing our minds over it."

You reached over, picked up the date from the plate where he had set it, and placed it back in the center of your board with a small smile.

"You are very bold for a man drinking my husband's wine, Lord Arryn."

His grin widened. "Is that a complaint, Your Grace?"

"That," you said pleasantly, lifting your own goblet, "is an observation."

He laughed at that and you found yourself, despite everything, almost enjoying it.

"Then I shall take it as an invitation," he said.

"You may take it however you like, Lord Arryn. It changes nothing."

He tilted his head, still smiling, studying you. "You are not what I expected, Your Grace."

"And what did you expect?"

"Something more distant. More formal." His eyes moved over your face. "You are funnier than I expected. And..." He stopped himself.

"Go on," you said.

He looked at you steadily. "More beautiful than I expected."

The words landed warm and you were just allowing yourself to feel something good for the first time this entire evening when a voice cut through from somewhere behind your left shoulder.

"Bold of him, is it not." Light. Amused. Meant for whoever stood beside her.

"She must be grateful for the attention." A second voice, lower, with a little laugh underneath it. "Women her age do not get it so freely anymore. Not when there are younger options in the room."

A pause.

"I suppose when you have done your duty and given your husbands their heirs there is nothing left but to take compliments where you can find them."

The warmth of the moment died so completely and so quickly it was as though it had never been there at all.

You set your goblet down.

Your smile did not move. Not even slightly. Twenty years had made you very good at that.

Ronnel had heard it too, you could tell by the slight shift in his expression, the flicker of discomfort that crossed his face before he smoothed it over. To his credit he opened his mouth as though he intended to say something.

"It has been a pleasure, Lord Arryn," you said pleasantly, before he could.

"The pleasure was mine, Your Grace." He said it quietly.

He left.

You sat very still.

Around you the feast continued, the laughter, the clinking of goblets, the hundred conversations of half the realm enjoying themselves. None of it had stopped. None of it had even paused. The world had kept moving through the thirty seconds it had taken for two women behind you to dismantle what little was left of the evening and it had not noticed and it did not care.

You reached for your wine.

A shadow fell across the table and the chair beside you scraped back loudly against the stone floor and Maekar dropped into the seat that Lord Arryn had left not two minutes ago. The chair groaned under him. He stretched one leg out, reached across youand grabbed a handful of nuts from the bowl near your elbow, and sat back.

Behind you, the two women stopped talking.

You took a sip of your wine.

"This night is far too long," Maekar said, to no one and put the nuts in his mouth.

You said nothing.

He chewed. Looked out across the hall with that assessing gaze of his, taking stock of the room. You kept your eyes forward and your wine in your hand and waited for whatever.

Then you felt it.

His gaze moving from the hall, to you.

"You are not eating."

"I am aware of what I am and am not doing, thank you."

He looked at the untouched plate. Then at you. "Eat something."

"I am not hungry."

"You have not eaten anything."

"Maekar, I am not hungry."

He reached over, picked up the date from the center of your board beside and held it out.

You stared at it.

"No."

He kept holding it out.

"I said no."

He put it down directly in front of you and reached for the nuts again.

You placed the date to the side.

"Who was he," he said.

"Lord Arryn's son. He was being polite."

"He was not being polite."

"We were having a perfectly pleasant conversation—"

"I know what I saw."

"Then you saw a young lord making conversation with a princess at a feast, which is entirely unremarkable and none of your concern."

Something shifted in his jaw. "It becomes my concern when a lord sits that close to my wife."

"Oh." The laugh that came out of you was not a kind one. "Oh, so that is your concern. A lord sitting too close." You kept your voice low but there was nothing soft in it. "How interesting that you find that so troubling."

He frowned. "What is that supposed to mean."

"It means," You turned to face him fully, your hands flat on the table. "That every woman in this hall has been looking at you since the moment you walked in like they want to pull you out of that doublet and not one of them has been subtle about it." You held his gaze. "And I did not see you rushing across the room about that."

He stared at you.

"That is completely different."

"Is it."

"Yes." Flat. Certain. "Because I am not interested in them."

"And yet there they are." You gestured vaguely behind him. "Looking. And here you are, saying nothing, doing nothing, and the moment one man speaks to me for five minutes—"

"He was not just speaking to you—"

"He was a boy with too much wine, Maekar, he was harmless—"

"I did not say he was not harmless, I said he was sitting too close to my wife and I did not like it." His voice had dropped to something very quiet now, which with Maekar was always more dangerous than volume.

"Those are not the same thing."

"Then what are you saying." You matched his tone.

"Because from where I am sitting it looks very much like you trust every woman in this room with your attention but you do not trust me with a conversation."

"That is not what this is." His jaw worked.

"Then tell me what it is."

He looked at you. "I told you. He was too close."

"He was making conversation."

"He was looking at you like—" He stopped again.

"Like what." You lifted your chin.

"Like he wanted you." He said it simply, no heat in it, just fact. "And I did not like it."

"You did not like it." You stared at him. "You did not like another man finding your wife attractive."

"I did not like another man thinking he had any right to—"

"But they do." You gestured behind him again, wider this time. "All of them. Every woman who has been staring at you and Baelor all evening, undressing you both with their eyes, whispering to each other—" Your voice caught slightly. You pushed through it.

"They think they have every right. And no one says a word about that. No one storms across the room about that. But one man sits beside me and suddenly—"

"You are my wife."

"So are you mine." You said it hard and fast and meant every syllable of it.

"That works both ways Maekar."

Silence.

He looked at you for a long moment and something moved behind his eyes.

"Something is wrong," he said quietly.

"Nothing is wrong."

"You have been acting strange since the moment you walked into this hall. This morning you were completely different." His eyes did not move from your face. "What happened."

You felt it then, that wall you had been holding up all evening, brick by brick begin to crack right down the middle.

You leaned in close. Close enough that no one around you could hear a single word of what was about to come out of your mouth.

"You want to know what happened." Your voice was low and shaking at the edges and you did not care.

"I stood in front of a mirror tonight and I looked at myself."

The ugliness rose up through your chest hot and unstoppable.

"I looked at my breasts, the way they hang now, the way they never sat the way they used to. I looked at my belly, soft and scarred from carrying six children. I looked at the marks on my hips, on my stomach—" Your jaw tightened. "All of it. Every part of me that used to be something else before I spent more than twenty years giving this family everything my body had to give."

His expression had gone completely still.

"And then I walked into this hall." Your voice dropped lower. "And I watched every young, smooth, untouched woman in this room look at my husbands like they were something worth having." Your throat burned.

"And I thought, why would they not look back. Why would you not. Why would either of you not look back and think, yes. That. Instead of — " You gestured at yourself. All of yourself. "This."

He said nothing.

You felt the tears brimming and you were on your feet before a single one of them could fall, because you would not. Not here.

You did not look at Maekar's face. You could not.

"I need air." Your voice came out wrecked and quiet and you did not wait for his answer. "Do not follow me."

You turned and walked and then you were moving faster than was dignified and you did not care even slightly. The hall blurred at the edges and from the corner of your eye you caught your sons.

Matarys, straightening. Aerion, frowning. Daeron going still mid conversation. Their faces all wearing different versions of the same expression and you looked away from all of them because if you looked at them properly right now you would fall apart completely.

A pair of Kingsguard fell into step behind you.

You turned and looked at them with an expression that stopped them where they stood. They did not follow.

You pushed through the side door and into the night and then you were running, your gown gathered in both fists, down the stone path and past the roses and the fountain and through the dark until the lemon trees rose up around you and the noise of the feast was nothing but a distant murmur.

You found a bench and sat down hard.

And you cried the way you had been holding back all evening, with your whole chest, bent forward, both hands pressed over your belly and your face crumpling and the tears falling freely into the dark with no one to see them and nothing left to hold them back.

As you sobbed you caught movement from the corner of your eye and looked up.

The lemon trees had been decorated, you had not noticed in your rush to get here, but now, with your eyes adjusting and the tears clearing slightly, you saw them properly.

Small glass Dornish suns hung from the branches, each one cradling a tiny candle that threw warm gold light across the leaves in shifting patterns.

And amongst them, tied with thin ribbon, barely larger than a child's palm,

Paintings.

You stood slowly and reached for the nearest one, your fingers closing around it carefully.

It was rough in the way of a child's work, uneven lines, colors slightly outside their edges but purposeful.

A dragon, painted in careful strokes of black and red, and beneath it a small cluster of figures. A family.

You reached for the second one.

Another dragon. Another family. Slightly different hand, Aemon's, you thought, more careful than his brother's, the lines steadier.

You stood beneath the lemon trees in the dark with a painting in each hand and felt something move through your chest.

"It was Egg's idea."

You startled slightly, turning. From the dark between the trees Baelor emerged, the soft light of the glass ornaments catching him in warm gold as he moved toward you.

"He came to me a few days ago and asked if there was something that could be done to make the gardens more beautiful for the feast." The corner of his mouth moved. "I assumed he meant flowers. More candles perhaps." He looked at the portraits in your hands. "And then he and Aemon appeared at my solar with those, and I understood."

You looked down at them again. The small uneven dragons. The little painted families beneath them.

Something in your chest pulled so tight it almost hurt.

"He wanted to show you himself, later in the evening." Baelor's voice was gentle. "It seems you found them first."

"Of course he did this." Your voice came out rough and you laughed despite yourself, small and watery.

Baelor moved closer. Not close enough to crowd you and reached into his pocket and pulled a cloth, holding it out to you without a word.

You took it. Pressed it under your eyes and took a deep breath.

"How long have you been out here," you asked quietly.

"Long enough."

"And him?" You nodded toward the far end of the garden where a second figure stood in the dark, keeping his distance. Still as a post. Watching.

Baelor glanced briefly over his shoulder.

"He followed you the moment you left the hall." He turned back to you. "I asked him to give you a moment."

You huffed at that and you felt yourself smiling.

You looked at Baelor eyes, and they were warm and full of concern.

You sat down at the bench and he waited and you nodded and he sat down next to you.

You still clutched the small portaits in your hand.

"Do you want to tell me," Baelor said, "what happened tonight."

You looked down at the paintings in your hands.

At the small painted dragons. The small painted families.

"It was a moment of weakness." You folded your fingers around the paintings carefully, not looking at him. "Do not concern yourself with me Baelor. You have far more important business to attend to tonight."

"Look at me."

You looked at him.

That careful composed layer of him entirely gone, stripped back to something underneath that he did not show many people and had always shown you freely.

He reached out and took your free hand. Slowly. Giving you every opportunity to pull away. And then he placed it flat against his chest, over his heart, and held it there with both of his.

"I am Prince of this realm," he said quietly. "Lord Hand to the King. Father to six sons." His eyes did not leave yours. "But I am your husband before any of it. We both are. And our duty to you extends far beyond anything our titles could put a name to." His hand pressed yours more firmly against his chest. "You are not a concern, you are not an obligation. You are our soul. Everything we are begins and ends with you."

Your lip trembled.

You pressed it together hard and it trembled anyway and you hated it and could not stop it.

Then you heard footsteps on the stone path.

Maekar stepped into the warm light of the glass ornaments and stopped just behind Baelor's shoulder, his eyes moving over your face. But his jaw was tight and something in his expression was raw in a way you had not seen from him in a very long time.

"My brother is right." His voice came out lower than usual. Rougher at the edges.

He stepped closer and looked at you the way he rarely let himself look at you in front of anyone.

"You are it." He said it low and certain. "You have always been it. For both of us. There is no version of any of this," he gestured between the three of them, "that exists without you at the very center of it." His throat moved. "There has only ever been you. There will only ever be you."

He held your gaze for a moment longer. Then he glanced briefly at Baelor and then he looked back at you.

And then Maekar, went to his knees in front of you.

The breath left your body.

Your face burned. Something low in your belly pulled tight and your thighs pressed together and you stared down at him with your heart hammering against your ribs.

He took both of your hands in his. His were large and rough and warm and they swallowed yours completely.

"What you said to me in that hall," He stopped. Started again. "The way you spoke about yourself. What you see when you look at yourself." His jaw tightened.

"It broke something in me, because it means we have failed you. Somewhere in all these years, we have failed you and I—" His voice dropped to almost nothing.

"I am not a man who fails at things he cares about. I do not know how to be that man. The thought that you have been carrying this—" He pressed your hands harder against his.

"Looking at yourself and seeing something lesser. Something diminished." His eyes burned up at you. "When I look at you I see the only thing in this world that has ever made me feel utterly incapable. Completely undone." A rough exhale. "You are the only thing that has ever had that power over me and you will never understand how completely I mean that."

You were breathing heavily. Both of them had their eyes only on you and the weight of it was doing things to you that had no place in a garden and every place in a bed. Your chest was tight and your face was hot and your hands were unsteady and you opened your mouth—

Voices.

All three of you straightened at once. Maekar was on his feet before you had drawn your next breath, and by the time the pair of guards rounded the corner you were all three standing at a respectable distance from one another like perfectly composed members of the royal family enjoying the evening air.

Or attempting to.

You were aware, that your eyes were red and your lips were parted and your chest was still rising and falling faster than it ought to be, and that both your husbands looked like men who had been in the middle of something they very much intended to finish.

Baelor's composure slightly frayed at the edges, Maekar's jaw set and his eyes still dark with everything he had not yet said. The picture the three of you made could be interpreted in a number of ways.

None of them entirely wrong.

The guards inclined their heads. The King was asking for both princes. Immediately, if it pleased them.

Neither of them looked pleased.

Baelor nodded once at the guards. Maekar said nothing, only held your gaze for one long charged moment that made the heat in your face travel considerably lower, and then turned and followed his brother.

You watched them go.

At the garden entrance Maekar stopped. Turned back. And with a short sharp gesture summoned the nearest Kingsguard and said something low that you could not hear. The guard nodded and posted himself at the entrance immediately, back straight, eyes forward.

For you. Without a word to you about it. Simply done.

You stood beneath the lemon trees in the warm gold light of the little glass suns, your children's painted dragons held carefully in both hands, and listened to your husbands' footsteps fade back toward the feast.

The garden settled into quiet.

You looked down at the paintings.

And Breathed.

The evening turned faster than you expected.

You did return to the hall later and somewhere between sitting down at the table and your second cup of wine the night shifted into something almost bearable.

Your sons noticed. Of course they noticed. They were their fathers' children and they had been watching you since you walked back through those doors and within minutes they had without discussion or instruction, rearranged themselves around you at the table.

Matarys on your left, talking across you to Daeron about something you did not follow but did not need to. Aerion on your right, loud, proud and gesturing too widely with his wine cup. Valarr had appeared from wherever Kiera had been keeping him, sliding into the seat across from you with a small smile that told you he knew exactly what he was doing and had decided to do it anyway.

Aemon and Aegon had simply wedged themselves in wherever there was space, elbows on the table, chins in their hands, completely unbothered by the decorum expected of princes at their grandsire's feast.

All six of them. Around you. Like they had agreed on it.

At some point during the evening you produced the two small paintnigs from the folds of your gown. You watched Aegon's face when he saw them and you pulled him toward you and kissed him on both cheeks and then his forehead and then his cheek again for good measure. He let you. Every single one.

Aemon submitted to one kiss and then pulled back with the expression of a boy who had a reputation to maintain, which made Aerion laugh so hard he spilled his wine.

You smiled more in that hour than you had in the entire evening before it.

When it ended, the room gradually emptied. You said your goodnights with warmth and kissed your sons, inclined your head to your goodfather the King and your goodmother who caught your eye and held it for just a moment with an expression that told you she saw more than she said, which was entirely characteristic of her.

You found a servant and gave quiet instructions.

The bathhouse sat apart from the main castle floors, connected by a short covered corridor that was mercifully empty at this hour. It was a small stone room, warm and low-lit, the water already heated by the smooth dark stones lining the basin, steam rising soft and slow in the candlelight.

You let the servant help you out of the gown and when you were down to nothing you told her to leave you.

She did.

You stood for a moment in the warm steam, in the candlelight, with no one's eyes on you.

Then you lowered yourself into the water slowly, let it rise around you, and closed your eyes.

You did not know how long you stayed like that. Long enough for the tension in your shoulders to begin to loosen.

Then footsteps. Two sets. Coming down the covered corridor.

You did not open your eyes. Did not say a word. Simply stayed where you were with your chin tipped back and your heart beating considerably faster than the warm water had any right to make it, and waited.

The door. The sound of fabric. A pause.

Then an almighty groan as Maekar lowered himself into the water on your left that was so deeply, startled a laugh out of you before you could stop it.

Baelor, settling in on your right, laughed too.

"Seven hells." Maekar's voice bounced off the stone walls. "Tell father next time he can kiss the arses of those lordlings himself."

"It is our duty," Baelor said mildly. "And his."

"Fuck duty sometimes."

A beat of silence.

"That," Baelor said, his voice dropping to something considerably lower, "I have to agree with. I would much rather be fucking something else entirely."

The heat that flooded your face had nothing to do with the water.

Maekar made a low sound of agreement that rumbled through the steam and settled somewhere in the base of your spine.

You opened your eyes.

Baelor was watching the candles, his expression unreadable but his eyes dark. And then Maekar's hand found the back of your neck, his thumb tracing slow along the line of your neck, following the bone of it.

Your breath caught.

Then Baelor moved.

He turned toward you in the water and stepped close, close enough that you felt him against your thighs, hard and hot and his hands found your hips beneath the surface and gripped them in a way that pulled a soft sound from somewhere in your throat that you had not given permission for.

His face was inches from yours, his mismatched eyes blown almost entirely black, the candlelight catching the water on his skin.

"More than twenty years ago," he said quietly, "you bewitched us." His thumbs traced slow circles against your hips. "The way you laugh. The way you move through a room. The way your eyes look when the sunlight catches them." His grip tightened, pulling you fractionally closer, the water shifting between you. "The way you tip your head back when the wind comes through your hair and you close your eyes and simply feel it." A pause. "There is no one. There has never been anyone. There will never be anyone."

Behind you Maekar's thumb moved from your neck to the shell of your ear, slow and deliberate, and you felt your eyes flutter.

"I remember," Baelor continued, his voice lower still, "very clearly after Aegon's birth. After you had recovered. The first night you undressed in front of us again." Something moved through his expression that was raw and entirely unmanaged. "The want I felt in that moment was beyond anything I had words for. Beyond anything I thought I was still capable of feeling after twenty years." His fingers traced upward from your hips, following the curve of you through the water. "If I could be selfish and I am telling you now that I want to be, deeply and thoroughly selfish, I would have you every moment of every day and still feel it was not enough."

His hand rose further, fingertips tracing the line of your throat, your jaw, his eyes following the path of them across your face like he was memorizing something he intended to keep.

"You have given this realm six sons," he said softly. "And the realm will remember only that. The realm will count you in heirs and duty and years of service and it will never once understand what it is actually looking at." His eyes met yours. "But we know. We have always known." His thumb traced your lower lip. "You are so much more than what you have given. So much more than what they see."

The water shifted as Maekar's hands found the underside of your thighs and gripped, pulling you back and settling you into his lap. The breath left your body. You felt him hard against you, felt the low rumble in his chest as he exhaled against your neck, and then his mouth found the skin beneath your ear and he sucked slowly, his tongue tracing the spot.

"Forgive us," Baelor said softly. "For ever making you feel otherwise."

You had no words. You had lost them somewhere between Maekar's hands on your thighs and his mouth on your neck and Baelor standing in the water before you close enough to feel the heat coming off him.

Baelor's eyes dropped.

The water sat just below your chest and your nipples peaked above the surface in the cool air of the bathhouse.

His eyes moved to Maekar.

Maekar, who was sucking a bruise into your neck with absolutely no apology for it, whose hands had spread wide and warm across your thighs beneath the water, holding you exactly where he wanted you. A soft sound left your mouth that you had no control over and then another as his teeth grazed the skin he had just marked.

Your head fell back against his shoulder.

"Please—" The word came out broken and breathless and wanting. "Please, I need—"

"We know," Maekar said against your neck. Low and rough and entirely sure of himself. "We know what you need."

Something passed between them over your shoulder, a look, brief and wordless and then Maekar's hands were on your hips and he lifted you out of the water without ceremony and set you down on the stone edge. No gentleness in it.

The stone was cool against the backs of your thighs.

He spread your legs and you felt the flush crawl from your face all the way down your chest and you opened your mouth to say something, anything and then—

Both mouths on you at once.

Baelor's tongue slow and precise, working you with that devastating patience of his, and Maekar's rougher, hungrier, no finesse in it whatsoever, just raw focused want.

Their mouths clashed against each other in the space between your thighs, neither yielding, both utterly consumed, and the sensation of it was so overwhelming that the sound that left you was nothing close to dignified.

Maekar pulled back just long enough to suck your inner thigh hard enough to mark it and then returned with even less restraint than before. Baelor's tongue moved in slow circles and then pressed flat and you nearly came off the stone edge entirely.

Your fingers tightened in Baelor's hair. Your other hand found Maekar's shoulder and gripped hard enough that he would feel it tomorrow and he made a low sound against you that vibrated through your entire body.

"Look at us." Maekar pulled back just enough to speak, his voice wrecked and rough. "Look down and look at us."

You looked down at them and the sight alone nearly undid you entirely.

Baelor's mouth on you was precise and devastating, his tongue pressing and curling and drawing out sounds from you that echoed off the stone walls, sucking everything you gave him like you were something to be savored. Your thighs shook around his shoulders.

You watched as he tenderly pressed his lips to the scar low on your mound and kissed it slowly, his eyes lifting to yours as he did it, holding your gaze, making sure you were watching, making sure you understood exactly what he was doing and why. Then his tongue, flat and warm, traced the length of it without hurry.

You made a sound that was half sob and half something else entirely.

And then he returned to your folds and you stopped being able to think about anything at all.

Maekar shouldered him aside.

Simply replaced him with that characteristic lack of patience and buried his face in you with a roughness that dragged a broken cry from your throat. Hungry, his hands locked around your hips pulling you against his mouth rather than going to meet you.

And then without warning, Maekar pulled back and grabbed Baelor by the jaw and kissed him hard, open and rough, a low groan coming from both of them as he licked the taste of you from his brother's mouth.

Baelor's hand fisted in Maekar's hair. The sound of it, the sight of it, pulled another wave of heat through you so sharply you whimpered.

They broke apart breathing hard, eyes dark, and turned to look at you at exactly the same moment.

Baelor reached for your ankles and pulled you back into the water between them and you went boneless, barely capable of standing. They pressed in from both sides, warm skin and hard bodies and hands everywhere at once and Baelor lowered his head and took your nipple into his mouth, kneading the weight of your breast in both hands while Maekar's mouth found your throat from behind, sucking and biting a path from your shoulder to your ear.

Your head fell back against Maekar's chest.

Your hands found his hair behind you and pulled and he groaned against your neck.

"Still think we do not want you," Maekar said roughly against your skin. Not a question. A statement, low and wrecked and burning. "Still think that."

You could not have formed a coherent answer if your life had depended on it.

Baelor in front, pulling you against him, his mouth finding yours in a deep kiss while his hands mapped every inch of your skin beneath the water without shame or hesitation.

And then Maekar pressed in from behind.

His hands gripped your hips and he slid inside you from behind slowly and the sound that left you was swallowed by Baelor's mouth. You grabbed at anything you could reach, one hand fisting in Baelor's hair, the other reaching back to grip Maekar's thigh behind you.

Maekar's pace built without mercy, his hands locked on your hips, the water churning around all three of you.

Baelor's hands cupped your breasts, his thumbs moving across your nipples slowly while Maekar drove into you from behind without restraint, and being pressed between them, held completely between their bodies, no space between you and either of them, was almost more than you could process.

Then Baelor lowered his lips to your ear, his voice dropping.

"Perhaps this time a daughter," he murmured. "I would not mind at all having you full with child again."

The sound that left you was shameless.

You felt Maekar shudder behind you, his grip tightening to the point of pain as he spent himself, his forehead dropping heavy against the back of your neck with a rough groan that rumbled through your entire body.

And then Baelor lifted you and pressed you back against the stone edge and slid inside you, deeper than Maekar's angle had allowed, and his pace was just as hard but slower, his mismatched eyes holding yours with an intensity that made it impossible to look away.

His hands gripped the curve of your ass, pulling you into every stroke.

Behind him Maekar watched, his dark eyes burning, and the sight of him watching you with Baelor sent you spiraling toward the edge faster than anything else could have.

Your thighs shook.

Your nails found Baelor's shoulders.

"I know," he breathed against your mouth. "Come for me."

It hit you like a wave breaking, white behind your eyes, your whole body shuddering between them, Baelor's and Maekar's name leaving your mouth as if you were praying a blessing. His grip on you was bruising and you did not care even slightly. Behind him Maekar's hand found your thigh and held it through the shaking like an anchor.

The white faded slowly.

The candlelight came back. The water. The warm stone at your back.

Baelor's forehead dropped against yours, both of you breathing hard and ragged, his chest heaving against you. His hands were still gripping your skin with an intensity that told you exactly what you would find on yourself tomorrow morning.

You did not mind it at all.

The heavy breathing eased slowly. Baelor pressed his lips to your forehead. Your cheek. The corner of your mouth. Small, soft things, entirely different from everything that had preceded them, and you felt tears prick unexpectedly at the gentleness of it.

Maekar's hand moved in slow steady strokes up your spine.

Nobody spoke.

The candles burned low around you and the water had gone still and the three of you simply breathed together in the quiet.

You looked at Baelor.

You took his face between both your hands and kissed him slowly and deeply and with everything you had not known how to say all evening. He kissed you back the same way, one hand covering yours against his cheek.

When you pulled back you were both quiet for a moment.

Then you turned and wobbled through the water toward Maekar, who had settled against the edge watching you both, and your feet slipped on the stone beneath and he caught you before you had even fully registered the fall, hands at your waist, steady and immediate, as though he had been expecting it.

"Graceful," he said.

"Hush."

The corner of his mouth moved.

You curled into him anyway, pressing your lips to his jaw, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He exhaled slowly beneath your attention and his arms came around you and held you against his chest.

Baelor settled in beside you both, his shoulder warm against yours, and took your hand beneath the water and simply held it.

The three of you sat in the low candlelight and the still water and said nothing for a long moment.

"I love you," you said quietly.

Maekar's nose pressed into your hair.

Baelor's hand tightened around yours.

"And we love you," Baelor said softly. "Every part of you. Everything that you are and will be and you once was."

Maekar said nothing.

He just held you closer.

Later, back in your chambers, the candles burned down to nothing and your husbands were restless and entirely unwilling to let the night end, and you gave yourself over to them completely and without reservation and they took everything you gave and returned it threefold.

It was very late when it finally went quiet.

Dawn came in slowly through the high windows, pale and soft.

You were the first to surface from sleep, barely, just enough to be aware of the warmth on either side of you. Baelor's hand rested open against your stomach. Maekar had his face pressed into the curve of your neck, one arm thrown across you both, heavy and certain even in sleep, as though some part of him had decided even unconscious that he was not finished holding on.

You lay very still and looked at the pale dawn creeping across the ceiling and took a slow breath.

The uncertainties were still there. The ugly, shapeless insecurities that had swallowed you whole. You were not foolish enough to think one night had erased them entirely. It did not work that way.

But here, in the early quiet, tangled in warm sheets between two men who had given you their souls without condition or hesitation, the uncertainties were very small, nearly insignificant.

Smaller than Baelor's hand resting against your stomach.

Smaller than the sound of Maekar breathing slow and deep against your neck, holding you flush against him.

Smaller, than two little painted dragons hanging in a lemon tree. Drawn by small hands that loved you without condition or any awareness of the cost of what you had given to deserve them.

You exhaled slowly.

And closed your eyes.

For now you let yourself simply be held.

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